This has to be the most tone deaf response I've ever seen from Bungie.
[b]"This is an area of the game with lower engagement that would take resources away from more popular parts of the game to shore up."[/b] is fancy wording for [b]"We don't care about fixing the mess we made and we now want it to die instead of fixing it."[/b] The audacity to hear people asking Bungie to fix Gambit for years only to tell them that they are actively trying to get less people to play it.
Removing Freelance and replacing it with Fireteam is just another way for them to reduce player count now that you are forced to deal with full fireteams if you decide to solo queue.
Bringing back Cathedral of Stars is nice but it should have never been removed from the map pool in the first place.
The only silver lining to this awful news is lucent hive and shadow legion.
The reason Gambit has a smaller player base is that Bungie broke Gambit and never decided to fix it for years.
If they have all these resources to add new maps, mechanics, matchmaking changes, and game modes to crucible. They had all this time to fix the Motes falling into the floor for two years.
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*Bungie fuses Gambit and Gambit Prime into something with the worst of both* "Gambit just doesn't have the player engagement"